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Monorail Refurbishment

The first thing they should be doing is opening the galactica gate to hotel guests and merlin passholders from 9am-10am with ert on Galactica/nenesis, would alleviate the monorail queues at the start of the day.
 
Could the events of 2020 have accelerated the demise of the monorail?

It was limping along already, being patched up over the years and was ready for some more investment a while back.

Covid has been the perfect ‘excuse’ for them to keep the monorail closed this year.

Opening the Galactica gate to hotel guests and making all others walk hasn’t appeared to result in too many complaints.

So is the obvious next step for management to just close it for good and save themselves the staffing and maintenance costs?
 
If they have gotten away with only very few complaints about the monorail since the park re-opened, I can't see it ever re-opening. The downsizing of the theme park rather than cherishing and developing all assets will likely continue.

I hope I am 100% wrong.
 
If the monorail does ever re-open, which I don't think it will now they've gone a whole year of people walking, it won't get a refurbishment.
 
I can kind of see why they’ve kept the Monorail closed with the size of the queue just to get to the park entrance, imagine people spilling out from the monorail, on exiting the station they’d have to walk back to join the queue again and would be chaos.
 
Monorail isn't feasible with social distancing. The queue for one thing would be back in the car park, it's fairly enclosed - and batching would be a total mess. Or they'd have to block off many of the rows of seats and capacity would be nowhere near enough

I expect it will be back next year though, or when the government guidelines are relaxed further.
 
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imanautie said:
Ive heard one person say it's nothing to do with distancing why it's shut.

Where do they do temperature checks?
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How can it not be? The rows of seats face each other.

Capacity would be shocking if they blocked off every other row, and there's no dividers on the "bench style" seats either. You'd have to have - at most - two people per row, Just wouldn't work.
 
Mikw said:
How can it not be? The rows of seats face each other.

Capacity would be shocking if they blocked off every other row, and there's no dividers on the "bench style" seats either. You'd have to have - at most - two people per row, Just wouldn't work.
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That's a good point, but is capacity something Alton are really fussed about right now?
 
imanautie said:
That's a good point, but is capacity something Alton are really fussed about right now?
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In a way yes they do as the monorail has a large indoor queue which in itself presents an issue when capacity would be so low. In addition to that at the car park side the outdoor overflow also causes issues with hotel guests being able to access the theme park and golf so would require a large amount of staff to police. At present the flow is mainly one way - toward the theme park. Add the monorail in and you have car park guests going against the flow of hotel guests and other day guests walking to the air gates or main entrance. You'd then get the same situation at the end of the day too.

At the theme park end, the current situation of walking to the entrance plaza enables a partially staggered flow of guests into the area, whereas regularly arriving monorails throwing up an additional glut of guests would cause problems with that.
 
It's thoroughly depressing to think about Merlins decision making with regards to Covid and cost cutting.

As we know, their track record is not good when it come to SBNO attractions, especially when they're in such a poor state.

The question is, will they bother to remove the track and support structures when it does close.
 
If temperature checks were moved from the entrance to the monorail station (hotel side)/Air gates/just outside the plaza next to the coach car park (for the guests that walk), it wouldn't particularly matter if there were large flows of guests entering the palza from the monorail station as they can go through the turnstiles as normal.

The monorail could reopen, if Towers were willing to change how they currently run operations. I can't say I blame them leaving things as they are for now.

It will be very sad to see the monorail go for good, if Merlin/Towers decide it's no longer worth keeping. While the majority are happy to walk, the monorail can be vital for a lot of guests and of great convenience to those staying in the resort, and it adds a lot to the 'magic' of entering/leaving the park. I hope it returns.
 
It would be very hard to operate the monorail currently, during busy periods queue times can stretch all the ways to the back of duel and further. I don’t think the security or temp checks slow things down massively. I’ve never had to wait particularly long if you arrive early enough, and it’s always a really quick process. But having people spread out is what makes queues look a lot worse than they are.

if you think normally half of those guests would be stood in the ticket cattle pen waiting to get tickets.

I’ll be surprised if it does open again, they’ve probably saved a fortune this season in staffing and maintenance. The walk isn’t that bad if you are parked towards the barriers, which is where they always start to fill the car parks. However I do think a more permanent hotel (or annual pass) entrance Needs sorting at Galactica, I’ve heard of times when the queue for that can be up to an hour.

Then I would make the main pathway to the entrance a little more user friendly, some of it is far too narrow and a bit basic. Add some nice lights and some audio like the golden pathway has and it would be improved.
 
I'd be surprised if the monorail trains would even work after being sat there for over a year, they weren't what you call smooth in the first place and I highly doubt they've ran them at all this year to keep them in check. They'll have probably rusted up by now.

As for the queues, really they should have set up a cattle pen in the coach park to cope with the temperature checks as opposed to making it stretch to the car parks.
 
siralgenon said:
As for the queues, really they should have set up a cattle pen in the coach park to cope with the temperature checks as opposed to making it stretch to the car parks.
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Why? If the queue moves at a steady pace anyway then it's not an issue that it's going back to the car parks as such, considering the vast majority of guests will be coming from there anyway. A cattle pen is the last thing they want during times of social distancing.
 
Burbs said:
Why? If the queue moves at a steady pace anyway then it's not an issue that it's going back to the car parks as such, considering the vast majority of guests will be coming from there anyway. A cattle pen is the last thing they want during times of social distancing.
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Because then you could use the monorail as the queue wouldn't stretch back to the other end. As long as they space it out like at Thorpe then it wouldn't be a problem.
 
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